Land assembly was a multi-year process at Fosterville South

Fosterville South expiration has projects that joined in Kirkland Lake gold. Fosterville tenements Fosterville gold. Mine is owned by Kirkland Lake gold. One of the world’s highest grade and lowest cost gold mines CEO is Brian says our Chuck Brian. Welcome to Wallace Michael. Thanks for having me on Brian.

Can you describe what you’re advancing at? Fosterville. Sure at Fosterville South we’ve acquired and dissemble over a multi-year process. What we believe is the premier exploration ground in Victoria. We’ve been drilling at two of our projects, golden mountain, and Lauriston Lauriston is likely the most well-known of our projects because Loris thin is 600 square kilometers in size.

It’s continuous with and immediately South of the Kirkland Lake gold, Fosterville mine tenements. And it has the big regional structures that run through the Kirkland Lake tenements on our ground. So the drill has just started to turn at Lauriston. We have been drilling at golden mountain where results to date have been excellent.

We’ve got approximately $29.5 million in cash. So we’re in great shape, uh, to continue to ramp up. We have drill permit applications in. At multiple projects and, uh, it’s been a really great, uh, story, and it seems like an overnight situation, but the land assembly actually took place. Like I say, over a multi-year period led by Rex Martin, our Victorian based geologists and co-founder and Brian you’ll also have a company in Mexico.

That’s right. Zach attack us. Silver is our Mexican silver, uh, entity. And we will actually commence trading with Zach to cactus silver on Tuesday, March 2nd, as Zach attack is, uh, is as the name indicates in the Zack attack, us mining region. We have a historic inferred resource that was 43, one Oh one compliant in 2019, nonetheless we’re treatment as historic of approximately 19.5 million ounces of silver.

And our plan in Zack attackers is to confirm and expand that known silver resource. And at the same time conduct the exploration on multiple high priority targets. Within the large land package. Uh, let’s uh, stick with a foster bill and maybe talk a bit about your team or you have a background of K2 mining.

Yeah, the team that we put together for Fosterville, so really was formed around Rex Martin, who I mentioned earlier. Rex grew up roaming around the Victorian gold fields, prospecting the gold fields as a teenager before going on to have a successful career internationally as a geologist. Rex worked all over the world, but kept an eye at all times on his own backyard.

And when the region started to heat up with some very early success that Kirkland Lake was having at their Fosterville mine, Rex quickly applied for and gobbled up a number of the key tenements in the region. Uh, joining Rex and I on the board of Fosterville South. James Hutton, the chairman who has a very enviable track record over the years in capital markets and M and a John Lewins who’s the CEO of canine to mining is an independent director on Fosterville South.

We put together a very good team of technical personnel in Australia, and combine that with some good capital markets experience here in North America. Uh, I want to hear from you because I think you’d be uniquely placed to talk about, uh, regional differences in just kind of managing risk in different jurisdictions.

Obviously you have with Australia, but also your experience, uh, with canine to, uh, in Papa, new Guinea, and then also what you have you’re managing in Mexico. But I think just one more piece of business, uh, with, uh, Fosterville uh, you also had a spin out, I believe with Leviathan gold. That’s right.

Fosterville South spun out a company called Leviathan gold. We spun out two of our assets of VOCA and Timor into Leviathan gold and every Fosterville South shareholder. At time of a record date received one share of Leviathan for every share of Fosterville South that they owned. Leviathan is now drilling and it’s a VOCA license.

And also his recently announced the addition of a second drill rig to site. So the drilling startup, and now the addition of that second drill rig at Leviathan has happened in Lightspeed. The company’s only been publicly trading for a couple of weeks. Now, can you tell us what we would see at, uh, Fosterville South?

What is the infrastructure? And what’s the area like. The area as a jurisdiction is ideal. And I think that the Leviathan example really exemplifies that this is a company that’s just come to trade publicly over the last couple of weeks, they’re already drilling. They’ve already increased the speed of the drill program through the addition of a second rig in Victoria, you have a real mining culture.

With the success that Kirkland Lake is having on their Fosterville tenements. It’s arguably one of the most important regions in the world for high-grade gold exploration access is excellent. Infrastructure is excellent. And the ability of very good technical personnel is evident as you ramp these programs up.

So from a jurisdiction perspective, Victoria is just truly top notch. Uh, you’ve been a CEO in a number of different regions. Maybe you could help out investors and then you could talk about, uh, different regionalities and then how you manage risks. Say one country compared to another. Absolutely. I think that for many investors, a mistake is assuming there are very good jurisdictions in the world to work and very poor jurisdictions in the world to work.

And everything is black and white. Some projects are simple, some are very difficult. And in my view, that’s just not the case. Every jurisdiction in the world has its unique challenges. Every jurisdiction in the world has its unique attributes and benefits to working within a particular area. I think that the most important thing is to have great local team members and great local support personnel in terms of contractors, et cetera, that know the region because every region is unique.

And public companies have to educate themselves on the region before they start to work in a particular area of the world and a one size fits all approach, just doesn’t work for mining companies involved in exploration development processing. What works in British Columbia might not necessarily work in different parts of Australia from a community relations perspective.

Those. Types of situations might not work in different parts of South America or Africa. Everything is unique. Everything has to be treated as a unique project. Every region is different and unique. And I think that the big moment or big part of advice that I would give is just not to try to treat all of these projects with a cookie cutter, one size fits all approach.

Brian, how would you get, how would you tell an investor to kind of get those pieces of information to kind of look at specifically at a project and kind of step back from just the country that it’s based. Well for the company, I think local is key. And if I use Fosterville South, as an example, Rex Martin, as I mentioned, grew up in the area as a geologist, he lives in the area.

Now he lives less than an hour drive just as an anecdote from the Kirkland Lake’s Fosterville mine tenements. He knows the area inside out. So for the company from a very early stage, even prior to becoming a public entity, we relied on Rex and his network in Victoria to really understand the lay of the land.

And I think that goes for an approach that should be applied everywhere as far as. The investment public. How do they know if a company is in a region that’s workable or not? I think that a key there is to take a look at the management team, take a look at their CVS. See if they’ve operated in diverse parts of the world with success in dealing with local communities, governments, et cetera, because a CEO, his job used to be.

More straightforward than it is today in many ways. Right now, key point of the CEO or the entire leadership team’s role is community relations. So you want to take a look at management and see if management has a track record of working in different places in the world with success in dealing with local communities, how safety government environment, et cetera.

Now I had this, I’ve been asking this question of a number of CEOs. I look forward to ask it to you, Brian, especially with your experience, uh, in the past year, uh, I laugh about it because I I’m asking this question on a Friday where we’ve had a breakdown in the gold price. Uh, but still, I mean, uh, you know, a gold price, either an 1800 to 1700 is higher than what we thought that we would have, I guess, at the beginning.

Of 2020, uh, you know, we’ve been through a long, uh, you know, a long spell, long dry spell, uh, through, uh, the last decade. It seems that we’re just having this resource lift, uh, this, uh, precious metal lift, uh, right now, what is different managing in this environment as opposed to when you’re managing in a bear environment?

Well, I like to think that out of the gate, whenever you’re forming these situations, And looking at different projects, you should anticipate bearish conditions. And one of the things as a group we’ve done is we’ve focused on grade. And when we, for example, in canine to mining of which I am a former president and I was a co-founder of it, canine two, we focused on grade early.

When we started to assess the project with the belief that grade is King. And even though I’m very bullish on gold. I want to look at these assets early. Look at them. From a bearish gold environment. And invariably what you come back to is that you want to assess and get involved in projects that are high grade high margin.

And that’s really been a focus. Now I’m extremely bullish on gold with quantitative easing infinity, this negative to low interest rate environment. Unprecedented, monetary stimulus, fiscal stimulus. I think that the ingredients are there for an amazing gold market, but that being said, if I’m wrong or if I’m wrong for a prolonged period of time before it happens, I want to be involved in projects that have the potential to do well in a much poorer golden environment than I envisioned.

What has it been like finding resources? I mean, we’ve had this a long dearth. I imagine that everybody’s suddenly asking for, uh, exploration, other supplies. Yeah, we’ve been at our different projects. We’ve been situated there, uh, for quite a while at each of the different projects. So we do have a very good pipeline of exploration, professionals, equipment, et cetera.

The one thing. Like all companies, I think over the past year, we’ve dealt with assay lab delays, et cetera. And I think that’s a function of the fact. There’s a lot of drilling that’s being going on around the world. So the assay labs have seen a lot of influx of drill core at the same time. Most of the labs have been working and some still are, were working.

At COVID type staffing levels. So assay labs have been slow around the world. So that’s been a challenge in this COVID environment, but we’ve been very fortunate on all of our projects that we have great local team members. So we’ve had no issues getting in and out. Of the field, uh, getting personnel to site, getting equipment to site, et cetera.

And again, that’s a big benefit of having local team members at a leadership level. And we’re fortunate to have that on each project. Now you’ve mentioned you have a, the three projects. I hope I’ve got them all, but, uh, maybe you can talk about, uh, your news flow over the 12 months, uh, for Leviathan. Uh Fosterville and then also what you have going on in Mexico.

What would be some highlights or milestones over the next year? Sure. So with Fosterville South continuing assay news flow, we put out drill assays at golden mountain. We’ve been very pleased with those drilling results to date. We will continue to drill at our Lauriston project where we’re awaiting our first assays.

Continue to work at golden mountain, continue to drill or start to drill. I should say, at other projects where we have drill permit applications in. So with Fosterville South, I see it being very newsy, drill intensive news flow. Uh, over the next year, we’ll have multiple drill rigs running. On multiple projects.

Leviathan is at a VOCA they’ve just started up drilling. They’ve now accelerated drilling. And again, I think the news flow there will be driven by the drill bet at Zack attack. As silver, we will be working to immediately confirm and expand the historic inferred silver resource. We will also immediately start to drill below that resource to show the market the huge potential to increase the size of the resource.

And we’ll get out and look at these other exploration targets on our big regional land package to conduct some pure exploration and expose investors to discovery. So it will be a very active year on multiple fronts with drills turning all over the world. Brian, thank you very much for speaking with Keiko.

Great. Thank you, Michael.